The producers of digital media content, such as music albums or films, generally wish to have their products made available quickly and efficiently in multiple countries, or even worldwide.
In recent years, a number of online distribution platforms have emerged meeting the need of supplying and/or selling media content products to online users, via the internet. For example, companies such as iTunes, Amazon and Spotify (the names “iTunes”, “Amazon” and “Spotify” are likely to be registered trademarks), to name but a few, provide websites allowing users the possibility of temporarily accessing media content over the internet, for example by having the content “streamed” to their access post, and/or the possibility of purchasing the right to download media content products via the internet, and store them for unlimited playback.
As with any distribution system, it is necessary that the products, in this case the digital media files, generated by the producer, are packaged and transmitted to the consumer outlets, in this case the distribution platforms. It has been proposed to at least partially automate this packaging and transmission process.
However, there are technical challenges in implementing such a system. For example, digital media products are generally sold to the end user in a format different to the format provided by the producer, and therefore format conversion is often required. This conversion requires relatively high processing resources. Furthermore, such systems must be capable of handling extremely high quantities of data. This situation is not helped by the increasing sizes of music, image and video files in recent years, due to a move towards higher sampling rates for sound, and higher definition for images and video. The storage and management of such large quantities of data is very demanding on system resources, particularly where thousands or even millions of media products are involved.
There is thus a need for a method and system for packaging and transmitting digital media content to distribution platforms.